WWUTT 215 Criticism, Fundamentalism, and Egalitarianism?

If a church is egalitarian, meaning that they appoint women to the positions of elders and deacons, is that enough of a reason to leave that church?

Well, we'll be talking about that issue and some others on today's program, When We Understand the

Text. You're listening to When We Understand the

Text, committed to sound teaching of the Word of God. For questions and comments, email whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com.

And don't forget our website, www .tt .com. Here's our host, Pastor Gabe.

Thank you, Becky. Hello, and welcome to the Friday edition of the program. I apologize for being a little bit late with this episode today.

If I'm ever late with an episode, it's usually the Friday edition, right? My sister and her husband came into town yesterday along with their boys.

It was kind of a spontaneous visit, and I meant to get this program recorded before they got here, but we got to cleaning house.

You kind of know how that is. That was kind of our commitment to the afternoon. I never sat down to respond to emails from listeners, which is usually what we dedicate the

Friday edition to, questions from listeners of this podcast and viewers of our videos.

If you would like to submit a question, whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com. I actually also have a Twitter request

I'm going to be responding to today. Sorry, I don't check the Facebook page all that often, but we are on Facebook, facebook .com

slash whatvideos, www .uttvideos, and at the top of the feed is our latest video for Galatians 328, which

I just posted yesterday, so you can go to the Facebook page, share it with your friends. That's why we do these videos.

That's why the ministry started was to be able to share some biblical content on social media. So this first question that I have today is actually a criticism regarding my blog, but the question pertains to our videos as well, because I get this question a lot about our videos.

So this is from Braun in Australia, and he says, dear Pastor Gabe, I find it very interesting that your blog does not invite interaction from those for whom it is written slash intended by having a comments section, which could be moderated by you if you are concerned about rogue questions.

This question suggests to this reader that perhaps you are unwilling to have your viewpoints challenged or even questioned, particularly when you use your blog to be critical of others without any recourse for those who may disagree to respond.

It also begs the question as to whether you are capable of interacting with intelligent articulate questioners.

I would be interested in your response to my questions. Kind regards, Braun. I don't really think his email was all that kind to tell you the truth.

Begging the question is whether or not I'm capable of interacting with intelligent articulate questioners, but I did respond to Braun this way.

I said greetings, Braun. Grace to you and peace from God, our father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

There are three reasons why comments have been deactivated on my blog. One is a deeply personal reason, and that reason will remain personal.

A second less crucial reason is that I don't have time to constantly monitor comments.

About 30 to 40 percent of the comments were vile, some even encouraging me to kill myself.

For my own sake and for the sake of my readers, the comment section is closed. No one should have to read any of that.

It's not too much to expect a little order in the court of public opinion, wouldn't you say? But there's another reason there is not a comment section, and that reason is specifically for you.

I don't want you to be reading a blog thinking about the comment you're going to make. I want you to read it, think about it, and if you're still thinking about it later, you can email and maybe we can talk about it.

I'm a pastor and I teach and I want you to learn. I don't leave my pulpit open to immediate expression and rebuttal, and likewise my blog is treated the same way.

I do welcome and encourage comments from my congregation and even disagreement. We do a sermon once a quarter where comments are taken from the congregation and responded to, but I want others to think, not respond in haste.

That discipline is also something I expect others to learn, as it says in James 1 .19, let everyone be quick to hear, slow to speak.

I came about this decision through prayer and discussions with others who have blogs or manage social media accounts.

It was not made in haste. I hope that you can appreciate these reasons, and if there's anything in particular you would like to discuss, you have my address,

InChristPastorGabe. So that response to Braun is really the same reasons why we don't have comments activated on our

What Videos either, and I will commonly get criticisms about that. Why won't you allow comments on the

What Videos? And those are my reasons. I don't think that the personal reason, now like I said to Braun, there's a personal reason why

I don't allow comments on my blog. I don't think that personal reason applies to the videos, but the other reasons do.

I have often said that if you want to see evidence of human depravity, go to any popular YouTube video and look through the comments section and there you'll have it.

For about the first 20 videos we did, we did have a comments section on YouTube, but the comments, like I said, they were vile.

30 to 40 % of the comments, extremely disturbing. And so after praying about it and talking with some other people who have been through the same sort of a situation, we eliminated the comments section and I've never looked back.

And we won't ever add the comments section back. And by the way, all of this is responded to in the

FAQ section on our Facebook page. I'm sorry, our website.

So if you go to www .utt .com and you click on FAQ, Frequently Asked Questions, it says in there, why don't you allow comments on your video?

And the reason is given there. The other reason that I gave to Braun is that I don't want you to be thinking about the response that you're going to make.

I want you to absorb the full argument that is being presented instead of switching off in your mind and going, okay,

I already know how I'm going to respond to this and not listening to the full argument as it's being presented. I get emails from people who took comments from a what video, which is only 90 seconds long.

But it's very clear in their criticism that they're taking something that I said in the video out of context. So they're not even considering the full argument that's being presented there in just a short 90 seconds.

I've also had instances where since starting this program, this podcast, somebody has emailed me and said, well,

I was listening to today's episode and you said this. Have you ever considered this? I don't agree with you, da, da, da, da.

And then a few minutes later, I'll get another email from that same person saying, oh, I see that you did address that in the episode.

Please retract. I retract my previous email. Sorry about that. That just goes to show you how in our

Internet age, where we have comment sections on anything and everybody's opinion is important, that a person won't even wait to hear the full argument being presented.

They've already got in their minds how they're going to respond to this. And so there's no reason for me to listen to the rest of what it is that you have to say.

I'm going to take this one section out and focus on this. And that's what it is that I'm going to respond to. So it's very important to consider all of what's being presented.

And so that's one of the reasons why a comment section has been disabled. It is actually for your benefit.

I want you to consider what is being said and to meditate on it. And then if you still want to talk to me about it, there are ways to get a hold of me.

I'm responding to emails right now. Like I said, I'm also on Twitter. What guy? WWUTT guy.

That's my Twitter handle. And if you really want to leave a comment that will be seen by other people, you can leave it on Facebook.

We appreciate the Facebook comments. I'm just telling you that I don't necessarily traffic the Facebook page all that often, so I don't see them.

If you specifically want to hear from me, email is the best way to get in touch with me. And again, it's when we understand the text at gmail .com.

All right. Speaking of Twitter, this next comment came from Twitter a little more than a week ago.

We were in Romans 13, and we were looking at the section where Paul says to pay your taxes. And I use

Kent Hovind as an example, an independent fundamentalist guy who felt like he didn't have to pay his taxes.

And the government came down on him for that. And he went to prison for nine years, got out of prison last year.

Forrester on Twitter asked me if I would consider Kent Hovind a credible teacher.

And I said, no, I do not. And he asked me, is there any way that you could elaborate why in a future podcast?

So I decided to respond to that here. Kent Hovind is an unrepentant law breaker.

He refused to pay his taxes. He broke the law. He went to prison and he's not sorry for any of it.

I just watched a video made on June 17th in which he says I did not break any laws.

Yes, he did. He claims that he went to jail for structuring issues. And it's been determined that the

IRS has abused structuring laws, which is true. They have. The IRS has done some rotten things during Obama's administration, including the targeting scandal.

My personal feelings about the internal revenue service is that it should be abolished, but the law is still the law.

And it doesn't change the fact that Kent Hovind broke the law. Be wary of he and his apologists who are saying things like the

IRS has apologized to him or Eric Holder admits that Kent Hovind was wrongly in prison.

None of that is true. He broke the law. He was tried for it. He went to prison for it.

Okay. But apart from that, I will tell you that I don't think anyone should be listening to Hovind for any kind of Bible teaching.

And I think the fact that he's a lawbreaker is a justifiable enough reason, but it's not the only reason.

Here's two more reasons. I would not recommend listening to Kent Hovind. Number two. Okay. So number one is he's an unrepentant lawbreaker.

Number two, he is factually unreliable. He calls himself

Dr. Dino, but his doctorate came from what's called a diploma mill. It's an unaccredited independent

Baptist school called Patriot Bible University in Colorado Springs. They just churn out degrees.

They're unaccredited. He has no credibility to be able to call himself a doctor. He also calls himself the atheist worst nightmare.

You know, he's a favorite target by atheists, but it's not because they fear him. It's because he's an easy mark.

That's why he gets so much criticism along with being factually unreliable. Hovind just makes stuff up.

I watched a video of his about how the King James Bible was translated, and he presented incorrect information in that video enough that I don't really think that he knows what goes into manuscript preservation and translation.

A lot of his teachings regarding creationism and the flood and dinosaurs. They're so out there.

They've been discredited by both secular institutions and Christian academia. The Christian Research Institute answers in Genesis.

They've both spoken out against some of Hovind's creationist claims. It's almost like a special revelation sort of a thing.

Like there are truths about creation. Hovind is privy to that the rest of us are not, and it's a common thing among independent fundamentalists.

I don't mean to shoehorn them all together, but it's just I can speak from experience. Let me put it that way.

A third reason not to listen to Hovind, and this goes beyond merely being factually unreliable. He is a liar.

And to give you one example, Hovind called Dr. James White a liar for claiming that he had a debate on a radio program with KJV only as Gail Ripplinger.

Hovind says such a debate never took place. Well, yeah, it did. It was in 1993, and if you poke around on the

Internet, you can find the audio. If Hovind disagrees with somebody, more often than not, he will slander them with dishonest information.

He is incredibly divisive. He is dishonest. He is a liar, and he has no business calling himself a

Christian teacher. He will be more judged. He will be judged more strictly for this, according to James 3 .1.

So that is my reasoning that I would give to you as to why nobody should be listening to Kent Hovind.

There are plenty of great Bible teachers that you can listen to. I already mentioned one, Dr. James White, instead of Kent Hovind.

Okay. This next question comes from Emerson. This was by email, and I believe this is the one that I didn't respond to last week.

I said I was going to save for this week. Emerson says, Hi. First off, I would like to thank you for your ministry.

Here's some quick background on my situation. I grew up Christian, and what I meant by that is

I made a profession of faith at a young age but never actually submitted my life to Christ. In other words, I wasn't a

Christian. About four years ago, God called me out of the sin and darkness that I was in, lust, pornography, and some other things, and he saved me.

Since that time, I have had a passion for the Lord and have become Reformed, come into the Reformed teaching. I'm pretty new, but I know the doctrines of grace, et cetera.

I truly want to follow Christ in everything that I do. Also, during this time, I married my wife, and we have been married for three years now.

We both went to the same church before we were married and have continued going there. However, I am really struggling as the leader of my household to allow us to continue going there, and here are my main concerns.

Number one, they allow women to be pastors and elders and also let them preach from the pulpit.

Number two, the gospel is very watered down. What I mean by this is they rarely ever talk about sin or repentance.

They also never mention the wrath of God. The sermon this last week was all about receiving grace and that we should never exclude anyone from grace, but never was repentance or sin talked about.

Number three, they are not Reformed at all. They aren't vocal Armenians, but I have to think the theology is very man -centered.

My question is, when do you leave a church? How do you go about finding a new one?

I don't want my family to jump around from church to church. Can you please help me? Well, I thanked

Emerson for his email, and I said, brother, I got to your first concern, the concern where he says they allow women to be pastors and elders and let them preach from the pulpit, and my answer was already this.

It's time to leave. Women as pastors may not be a fundamental issue. A person can believe that women can be ordained as ministers and still be saved.

However, in our culture today, that issue alone is a good way to gauge whether or not a church is going to be submissive to the full counsel of God.

If that church is egalitarian, in other words, they believe women can fill the same roles as men, then the answer is that they are not submitting to the full authority of the scriptures.

If a church is willing to bend on that issue, there will be problems with other doctrines as well, and that's why that Emerson is receiving a very watered -down gospel that seems to be very man -centered.

The situation won't ever improve as long as they're willing to put women in the role as a pastor. It is an important enough issue that you should leave that church.

When you do, if you are in a church where they appoint women as pastors and you do decide that it's time to leave,

I would still encourage you to be civil about it. Talk to the pastor and let him or her know your convictions.

Say to them that you have no intention of sowing seeds of discord, but if anyone asks, you tell them the truth about why you are leaving.

If you have children, be very clear in guiding them about what's going on.

Like Emerson said, he doesn't want to leave his family with the impression that jumping from church to church is okay, but if you know anyone else that leans on the

Reformed side of things, whether they live close to you or not, talk with them about how to find a good, sound church.

Again, communication is key. I don't care how bad the teaching is coming from the pulpit, how heretical it is,

I still think when you leave a church, you should still sit down with that individual and explain to them why.

It could be that no one has yet come forward to them and tried to correct them on that teaching, but I would say if something heretical is coming from the pulpit, you should leave.

Explain to them why. Try to correct their teaching. If they won't listen to you, that gives all the more justifiable reason as to why you should leave, but if the teaching is heresy, you still should go because clearly that person is not fit for that role as a pastor, and they've got some growing and learning to do and should probably step out of the pulpit until they come to understand the doctrines rightly before they continue that role or that calling of being a teacher again.

Anyway, for the sake of not going on and rambling, let me come back to the topic at hand, but specifically about women pastors and elders.

I am not alone in my opinion of this. Mark Dever of Capitol Hill Baptist Church, popular for many of the

Nine Marks books that you've probably read, including Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, he said, it seems to me and others, many who are younger than myself, that this issue of egalitarianism and complementarianism is increasingly acting as the watershed, distinguishing those who will accommodate

Scripture to culture and those who will attempt to shape culture by Scripture. You may disagree, but this is our honest concern before God.

It is no lack of charity nor honesty. It is no desire for power or tradition for tradition's sake.

It is our sober conclusion from observing the last 50 years. Of course, there are issues more central to the gospel than gender issues.

However, there may be no way the authority of Scripture is being undermined more quickly or more thoroughly in our day than through the hermeneutics of egalitarian readings of the

Bible. And when the authority of Scripture is undermined, the gospel will not long be acknowledged.

Therefore, love for God, the gospel, and future generations demands the careful presentation and pressing of the complementarian position.

The complementarian position is very simply this, that God has created the sexes unique and for different purposes.

In the image of God, he created them male and female, as we read in Genesis 127. There are things that God has designed a man to do that a woman cannot do.

Likewise, there are things that God has called a woman to do that a man can't do and shouldn't do.

As I have said from my pulpit before, there are pieces of advice that a woman needs that should come from another woman and should not come from a man.

And that is one way in which women need to be teaching women in the church. Absolutely, a man needs to be filling the pastoral role, and women need to submit to his teaching.

But a woman also needs to be a teacher of other women. And like I said, there are ways that women can teach women that man can't teach women.

A man can't teach women. So that's very important in the church as well. And so that's the complementarian position.

That God has designated some things for a man, some things for a woman. A woman can't do what a man's supposed to do.

A man's not to do what a woman is supposed to do. But the two of them, in their strengths and weaknesses, complement one another, hence the term complementarian, and they become a functioning unit.

In our bodies of Christ, there are going to be. Well, there's one body in Christ. Don't misunderstand me, but I mean bodies in terms of different church congregations.

So in the respective church bodies that we are, there are going to be men and women.

If we had church congregations that were all men or a church that is all women, that would be a dysfunctional church because the instruction is to have men and women together in the church.

In Titus 2, you have Paul's instructions to the older men of the church, the older women of the church, the younger men, and the younger women.

And these four parts, older men, younger men, older women, younger men, younger women, functioning together, fulfilling their respective roles, and you have a functioning body of Christ.

That's how this is supposed to work. That's the complementarian position. The egalitarian position is that men and women, there's no really distinguishable characteristic between the sexes.

Anything that a man can do, a woman can do. Women can fill men's roles just as much as men can, on and on, which we do not see that in the

Scriptures. That is not the way the Scriptures presents that at all. Now, I will tell you this. When we read in Ephesians 5 that wives are supposed to be submissive to their husbands, husbands are to lay down their lives for their wives just as Christ did for the church, that does not mean that all women are supposed to submit to all men, nor does it mean that all men die to all women.

That's not what's being implied there. That's specifically instructions for the household, for a husband and a wife.

But the position of a pastor is supposed to be filled by a man, elder, deacon, likewise, and everybody in the church, men and women, are supposed to submit to that authority.

If your church takes an egalitarian position and believes that women can be appointed to the positions of elders or deacons in the church,

I would say that is enough of an issue for you to leave that church. It's not a fundamental.

It is not a requirement to be saved that all pastors have to be men or else they're not actually

Christians. Not what we're talking about here, but it is enough of a deviation from the authority of God's word that if you see that happening in your church, absolutely, it's time to find a new church.

I'm going to conclude, because I think that it fits so well, with the video that we just did yesterday on Galatians 3 .28.

Galatians 3 .28 says, There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Paul is very simply saying that in Christ no one is inferior and no one is superior. Jews can't consider themselves better than Greeks, nor can the

Greeks think of themselves as better than the Jews. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and are justified by His grace as a gift.

Slaves were treated as less than human, and had fewer rights than one who is free. But like with the

Jew and the Greek, there is no distinction, for both are enslaved to sin, and both are equally set free in Christ.

Women were considered by the culture to be subservient to men. But as with the Jew and the Greek, and the slave and the free, both are made in the image of God, and to both are given the kingdom of God.

That's the part of the verse that tends to get abused. What Galatians 3 .28 doesn't mean is that women can be pastors and deacons.

Paul said elsewhere that those are roles specifically designated for men. Nor does this verse mean that God is cool with transgender behavior.

Paul said elsewhere it is disgraceful for men to look like women, or women to look like men, and Deuteronomy 22 .5

calls it an abomination to the Lord. God created the sexes unique and for different purposes.

There are things a man can do a woman cannot, and there are things women can do that a man cannot. Both must fulfill their calling according to God's will and His design, complementing one another in strength and weakness, for we are many parts, but one body in Christ Jesus when we understand the text.

Thank you for your questions, Bron, Forrester, and Emerson. If you would like to have a question submitted to this program,

I'll either respond to you by email, or perhaps it'll air on a future episode of the broadcast. Send it to whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com.

Thank you so much for joining me today, all this week. Next week we're jumping into Romans chapter 14, so I'll talk with you again on Monday.

God bless. You can find a complete list of videos, books, devotionals, and other resources online at www .tt